Forgive Me

by Daniel Palmer

  “Friends, but no family except Dad and me,” Angie said.

  “Your mother was an only child?” Jean asked.

  “I don’t actually know,” said Angie. “I never knew any of her family. There’d been some kind of feud before I was born.”

  “A feud? What about?” Jean asked.

  That’s funny, Angie thought. The topic had never come up with Jean in all those years because they hadn’t had any reason to broach the subject. Angie had pressed her parents for information, but it wasn’t something she openly discussed with others.

  “The feud was over me, I guess,” Angie said. “My mom was pregnant and unmarried, and her family wasn’t too keen on my dad. Some heated words were exchanged, and I guess things got a bit out of hand. My mom hadn’t spoken to her family since.”

  Jean pursed her lips. “Such a shame. Why do we let these things get in our way? Life is too short for petty differences.” She was being more candid and forthright than usual. Maybe it was the vodka talking, or maybe, with Sarah gone and almost certainly dead, she was speaking from experience.

  Whatever the reason, Angie believed she was right.

  The drive home usually involved a detour north to New York City. Angie wasn’t big on shopping the way Madeline was, but she enjoyed the energy and the food, and sometimes they snagged last minute tickets to a Broadway show.

  This year, though, Angie asked to skip New York altogether.

  Madeline couldn’t mask her disappointment.

  “It’s the photograph, isn’t it?”

  “Hard to let go and have fun,” Angie admitted.

  “Well, now I’m pissed.”

  “At me?”

  “No, at this damn problem of yours. It’s keeping me from New York. I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “What do you plan to do about it?”

  “I’m getting a coffee so I can jumpstart my brain. I think it’s time for a fresh set of eyes on this problem.”

  “Whatever it takes to inspire your brilliance, I’m all for it.”

  Madeline pulled into a strip mall and they marched into a Starbucks. Some male eyes tracked Maddy’s approach to the counter area, as male eyes often did. Angie got a black coffee and Madeline ordered something that sounded like she was speaking a foreign language. Angie was five sips into her beverage before Madeline’s drink showed up with a little Mount Everest of whipped cream on the top.

  “How can you drink that after those White Trash Puff Balls?”

  Madeline made a wide circle with her arms that encompassed them both. “This is a judgment free zone. Okay?” She took a big sip of her drink and spooned a finger full of whipped cream into her mouth.

  “Not judging,” Angie said. “I’m jealous.”

  Madeline handed over her straw. Angie used it take a dollop of whipped cream for herself and then a sip of something with a delightful caramel aftertaste.

  “So, any ideas?” Angie asked.

  Madeline went silent for a time, thinking. “One,” she eventually announced.

  Angie leaned closer, her excitement showing. Madeline was as brilliant as she was beautiful, and when she had an idea, Angie listened.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “So your mom mails a check every year to this ear place,” Madeline began.

  “Yes, the MCEDC,” Angie said.

  “Call them.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe Mom made the gift in I.C.’s memory,” Madeline said with a smile.

  Angie beamed. “Why the heck didn’t I think of that?”

  “Sometimes we’re too close to the problem to see the solution.”

  Angie’s moment of elation was short lived. “It’s Sunday. The place will be closed.”

  Madeline patted Angie on the hand. “My dearest, this mystery has been waiting to be answered for over thirty years. I think it can wait one more day. And that means we can head north to New York City without even a hint of guilt to get in our way.” She put away another heap of whipped cream balanced miraculously on the end of her straw and gave Angie a wink.

  Tuesday afternoon, noon sharp, Angie picked up the phone and dialed the number for the MCEDC in Burbank, California. Mike and Bao were on assignment—new jobs, something other than the Nadine Jessup case. They couldn’t help identity I.C. any more than Angie could.

  She still felt tired from the weekend. She and Maddy had caught a three o’clock showing of Chicago, then poked around Rockefeller Center until after eight. Maddy had crashed at Angie’s place a little after midnight and got up at 5:00 A.M. so she could get to work on time. Even though yesterday was Memorial Day, they both had had to work. Runaways and sex crimes didn’t take holidays.

  For Angie, the entire weekend was well worth the sleep deprivation. She had desperately needed some laughs and got plenty, along with some girlfriend advice about Bryce Taggart, who’d texted her while she and Maddy were dining at a Greek restaurant in midtown Manhattan. She thought back to the conversation.

  “He wants to take me out Saturday night,” Angie said to Maddy, reading Bryce’s text.

  “Tell him to send a selfie. I need a visual.”

  “I can’t do that,” Angie said, mortified.

  “Well then, let me see his Facebook.”

  Angie searched Bryce Taggart’s name on her Facebook app, but didn’t find his profile.

  “He’s a U.S. marshal,” Angie said. “You’re a DA and have an unlisted phone number.”

  “Good point,” Maddy said. “Plenty of creepers out there. Okay, here’s my take. It would be better if you could just grab a coffee. But coming up from Baltimore for a date, we’re talking commitment. You’ve got to plan for at least three hours. Can you handle that? Are you prepared?”

  “I already had coffee with him,” Angie said. “He’s easy to talk to.”

  “And cute?”

  “Yeah, he’s hot.”

  “In that case, what are you asking me for? Much as I love you, Ange, I don’t want to be Thelma and Louise: The Geriatric Years. Go out with him.”

  Angie had accepted Bryce’s invitation with a text reply and was looking forward to seeing him in six days, but it wasn’t the most important thing on her mind. She was too focused on the call to the ear institute. She held the picture of I.C. in her hand, while holding her breath. Her emotions vacillated between hope and dread.

  A voice, noticeably softened with age, answered on the third ring, “Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity Center. This is Dot speaking. How may I help you?”

  “Yes, um, my name is Angie DeRose and I’m calling from Alexandria, Virginia.”

  “Yes, Angie, what can I do for you?”

  Angie explained the situation. Dot listened patiently then said she would have to check the records and would get back to Angie later in the day.

  Later could not come soon enough. Angie managed to catch up on paperwork and completed the expense report for Greg Jessup, who owed them quite a chunk of change for the retrieval of his daughter. Nadine hadn’t called or texted since her visit to the office, but Angie thought about her all the time. She wanted to take Nadine out for lunch, just the two of them. It wasn’t Angie’s place to keep tabs on the girl’s welfare, but she couldn’t help herself. The last time she had gotten that emotionally attached to a case had brought Bao into her life.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, her phone rang.

  “Yes, hello. Angie here.”

  “Hi Angie, this is Dot from the MCEDC.”

  Angie’s heart began to race. A feeling of excitement covered her like a second skin.

  “I’m afraid we have no record of your mother making the donation about anyone specific. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been of more help.”

  Angie sighed aloud. She felt trapped in a giant maze, with so many dead ends she began to wonder if a way out existed.

  “Now you said this was all from a photograph you found, is that correct?” Dot sounded eager to help.

  “That’s righ
t,” Angie said.

  “Might you send it to me? I’ve worked here for thirty-five years. My son had the condition, and I became a volunteer and eventually an employee. Maybe I’d recognize the girl if she was ever a patient here. I couldn’t give you her name, of course, but I could give her yours and maybe she’d get in touch.”

  “I’m afraid she’s deceased,” Angie said.

  “Well in that case, we have nothing to lose, do we?”

  Angie took a picture of the photograph and e-mailed it to Dot. It was faster than navigating her own mass of e-mails to look for the scan Mike had sent her. Dot received the image across the country about a second after Angie sent the attachment. Technology had made so many things easier, but it couldn’t help her identify a girl solely by her initials and date of birth and death. It was a long shot and she knew it, but Dot had been there for years, and maybe this little girl had been a patient once.

  Dot made a sound, something between excitement and shock. “Angie, I know this girl.”

  “You do?”

  “But not because she was ever a patient here.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Oh my,” Dot said. “What is your mother’s connection to her, I wonder?”

  Angie wanted to scream, but managed to find the restraint. “I’m wondering the same,” she said, her voice a bit shaky. “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Isabella Conti. I remember her only because I and the other parents with children who had Microtia thought we might finally get some much needed attention, some real publicity, which meant more funding for the condition.”

  For a moment Angie couldn’t breath. I.C. now had a name. Isabella Conti.

  “Why would Isabella get you any publicity?”

  “Not the girl,” Dot said. “It was her father. Antonio Conti.”

  The name meant nothing to Angie, and she said as much.

  “Back in the early eighties, Antonio Conti was a member of the Giordano crime family in New York. It was big news, a national story when Antonio Conti turned state’s evidence against the Giordanos. Antonio had a wife, but I don’t recall her name, and of course he had his daughter, Isabella.”

  “What happened to them?” Angie asked. Not a drop of moisture was present in her throat.

  “Like I said, there were lots of news stories about the trial, and Isabella’s picture was in the paper and on TV regularly. The reporters made several mentions about her ear. I remember this, of course, because my son, Ronnie—oh, he’s Ronald now, I think I told you—had the same condition. He’s forty-eight now, with three children of his own, but none of them have what he had.”

  “The girl,” Angie said, gripping the edge of her desk, her fingers whitening from the pressure. “What happened to her?”

  “I have no idea,” Dot said. “After the trial, the whole family just disappeared.”

  CHAPTER 42

  You don’t come back the same from what I did. It’s impossible, I think. There is no way things can return to how they were before. I see a shrink and a social worker now, and talk to these people from the FBI and NCMEC and whatever. They’re just people trying to help me, but I honestly don’t know if I can be helped. Everything about me is tainted with something I can’t scrub off my skin no matter how many showers I take—and believe me, I’ve taken a lot.

  I’ve read stuff online about people like me. People who were trafficked. That’s the word for what I was—trafficked. The numbers are really mind-blowing. 21 million, I read somewhere. Something like 4.5 million people who are trafficked are also sexually exploited. Exploited or not, I consider everyone who gets trafficked for whatever reason, forced labor or forced sex, to be part of the 21 million club. But that’s just a number, right? It doesn’t really mean anything. I mean, let’s be honest, 21 million! I’ve tried to imagine it, tried to wrap my brain around it. I’ve been to FedEx field for a Taylor Swift concert and once for some dumb football game. I think it held like, I dunno, 80,000 people. I need my calculator to do the math. 21,000,000/80,000 = 262.5 FedEx stadiums full of victims. 262.5 stadiums! Damn, it’s still too big to get my mind around, so instead I focus on one number that means something to me, a number that means the most to me, in fact. I focus on the number 1. Why? Because there’s 1 person named Nadine Jessup who lives in Potomac, Maryland who got trafficked for sex. That’s the number that resonates for me. 1, the number that crawls into my brain every night as I try to fall asleep, thinking about the apartment I once shared with Ricardo and then the one I shared with Tasha. 1 got me caught up in that life for whatever reason. Everything that happened to me happened to only 1 person. They can eradicate (still got my vocab!) sex trafficking, I mean free all 21 million human trafficking victims worldwide and that number 1 will still be with me, following me like a shadow, sticking to me like a tattoo. Of all the victims around the globe, I might not have suffered the most, but hey this isn’t a competition. The point I’m trying to make here is that I’m more than a statistic. I’m more than a success story on Angie’s wall (love her BTW).

  I’m a 1.

  Now multiply me by 21 million.

  Oh, I should note my journal is gone so I’m starting anew. The old one is with the police, I guess. WTF, right?! Wrong! I’m glad they have it if it will help put those a-holes away. Go on! Read all my private thoughts. Read all my sinful deeds. Go page by page and find out for yourself everything I’ve done and who I’ve done it to. Hell, it’s not the first time I’ve been naked and exposed in front of strangers.

  The looks I get around town are a CRAPLOAD worse than what I got when I was with Buggy and Casper. The strangers I ran into in Baltimore (now I know for sure that’s where I was) always looked at me like a curiosity. What’s she doing with them? That kind of curiosity. But around here the looks I get are a whole lot different. Sure some people eye me with sympathy—“poor little girl” kind of thing—but mostly what I feel is judged and dirty. They look at me and I can just tell their minds are working overtime trying to figure me out. But they’re not thinking about the hole, or the cigarette burns, or the knives, or all the threats. They’re thinking what I probably would be thinking about one of my friends if she was there instead of me. I’d be thinking, why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you call for help sooner? There’s only one answer they can come up with. I didn’t want to leave.

  So Screw THEM!!!

  I wish I didn’t care what anybody else thinks. But when you’re 1 out of 21 million, life can feel pretty damn lonely.

  Okay, let’s talk about my mom and dad. Nothing has changed. Mom still drinks and my dad is still not interested in me. I spent a night at his place and he took me out for dinner. But he didn’t know what to say to me. I swear it was like the weirdest conversation ever! How’s the fish? Do you want another Coke? Um, yeah, okay Dad. . . . Is that really all he has to say to me?

  Before all this I was just his great mistake, right? Well, my mom was his great mistake and I was the aftermath. I just don’t get it. I’m his daughter! Does he feel guilty because he couldn’t keep me safe or is he ashamed of me because I slept with so many men? One thing I know for certain, I’m not his innocent little girl anymore. Daddies always see their daughters in a certain light. Well, I want the lights to go out. I don’t want my dad to see me at all anymore.

  How do I get drugs? Seriously? I don’t know how. Do I go to some street corner here in Potomac and wait? Do I steal my mom’s car and drive back to Baltimore? Where do I get them? Where? Believe it or not, I actually miss something about my old life. Back there, when the business of living hurt too much, I could always take a pill.

  I spend most of my time in my bedroom. I feel sort of better surrounded by my things. I say sorta because it all looks so childish to me now. Like I’ve outgrown everything I own. My clothes, my books, my posters, my music, everything. It belongs to a girl who didn’t know anything about the big bad world. Now that I know—taken a bite of the forbidden apple kind of know—I want to get rid of it all
. The old Nadine is gone and this new person doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Anna Kendrick. This new Nadine no longer believes we could be BFFs.

  So that was awful. JUST AWFUL! I went over to Sophia’s house for the first time today. Her parents were home and the way Sophia’s dad looked at me made me kind of sick. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe he wasn’t looking at me in that way. Maybe her dad just reminded me of the other dads who for whatever reason forgot they had daughters of their own.

  Anyway, it was so awkward there I wanted to scream. Brianna, Sophia, Hannah, Madison, we were in Sophia’s basement, all together for the first time. Yes, I ran away, but I didn’t run away from them. I ran away from my mom mostly because there’s only so much a girl can take. But I never wanted to leave my friends. So now we were together again at last. But it wasn’t like before. I forgave and forgot everything Ricardo pointed out to me. Jump off a bridge 4 real. Calling me fat, those things. That’s just girl-trash-talk. I mean I’ve said mean things to them, but it was always jokingly, and even if they were serious I needed my friends more than anything, so forgive and forget I say.

  For the longest time nobody said a word. We just sat on the couch drinking soda and watching some crap on MTV. I mean it’s so unlike us. Before, when we were all together, you couldn’t get us to stop talking. But this was awkward to the max. Sure, I got some hugs. Some, how are you doing? That kind of thing. But then it was the silent treatment. So I just blurted out—No I didn’t get pregnant! No I don’t have an STD or AIDS. YES I’ve been contacted by a bunch of people who want me to sell my story. NO I’m not selling it. YES I screwed a lot of guys! A LOT! What else do you want to know? How do we get over this? I’ll tell you anything you want to know.